Friday, 22 March 2013

Here are a few pictures of my submission to ISTD (International Society of Typographic Designers) that has been taken to London today. This book was pretty complicated to put together due to layering of pages, french fold binding and additional elements such as business card inserts and the laser cut box but it all came together in the end, I just hope the judges like it.

As part of the brief we had to write a strategy which gives a little bit more info about the idea/concept behind the book:

Books Still?

Coda is a book about death; it could be considered both an
academic journal on the subject of death and a play on the ongoing discussions
about the death of print and the physical book in the digital age. My interest
in the physicality of books and the reader’s relationship with them instigated
the production of a printed outcome, but I wanted to create a further dimension
to the reading experience.

After researching the topic I decided to break the book down
into three layers. The first is a dying dialogue taken from a chosen film(s),
the popular culture element. The second is an academic paper written about the
significance of death and violence, referencing the film in the first. In the
third layer I used philosophical and scientific text that are seminal to the
subject of death, so with each layer the reader gains a greater knowledge of
the subject.

The concept of this book starts as soon as you engage with
it due to the nature of the outer box. The first act is to tear part of it
away, damaging it from the beginning. The body of the text is physically
layered, each section with a perforated edge, it forces the reader to break
through each layer to get to the next. This in turn asks the reader two things,
how much do they really want to know about death and are they happy to destroy
or ‘kill’ the book in order to read it. This process of deconstruction also
means that the reader has a unique experience leaving the book forever changed,
and very difficult to reread.

The layering component also gave the opportunity to utilise
different typographic elements and paper stocks that get darker the further the
user interacts with the book, adding to the intensity as the topic reaches its
crescendo. The use of different typographic features and layout also helps the
reader distinguish and navigate through the different sections of the book.

Wednesday, 6 March 2013

This week I really enjoyed screen printing a quick poster project, although it was slightly more complex than I originally thought and had a few heads scratching about the best way to produce and print it. Luckily I had help from the amazing Richard Falle, Arthur Buxton and Dave Fortune.